29 March 2017

Apples

When it comes to big projects I can be the best procrastinator out there.

Back in 2010 I started the "Apples" project. This was an animation I wanted to make, with fancy sounds and wicked animation. In the end it turned out just basic. But still, I got to finish it, which is pretty amazing for me.

It took me up until 2013 to actually finish it. Most of the basic work had already been done in 2010. Stuff like the storyboard, timing, and even a whole bunch of animation. But then I got to a speed bump where I stopped working on it for a while, but that "while" turned into a few years.

That speedbump was something stupid that I did to myself. I had chosen to put the outlines of the character in different colors. With that I mean that a grey hat would have a darker grey outline, while the purple hair would have a darker shade of purple for its outline.
This of course meant that I had a lot of colors to put down, not only the inside colors, but also the outlines. Let me tell you, putting ten different colors on the outlines for each of the 24 frames in a second adds up to a whole lot of painstakingly slow work.

Being a massive procrastinator, that speedbump made me lose interest in the project. Thus it was only in 2011 that I continued working on the project. However, it could not be helped, again it fell in my folder of projects that I'm still working on and it stayed there for a long time. Apparently I did make two extra frames in 2012.

The real finish was in the summer of 2013. You know that moment where you look at the kitchen sink and you see a pile of dirty dishes, and suddenly you get the feeling its moving, sort of breathing maybe? That moment where you realise you better clean that shit up before you end up calling a biologist with the good news you discovered a new creature.
Yeah, that's the moment I had with my animation as well, I just had to finish it. Most of the work had already been done so it was just a matter of finishing up the last frames of animation and doing some slow repetitive work. So in August I finally uploaded the finished animation on devianart.

Back then I had no idea how to convert .sfw files into video files for youtube. Thanks to my Dailywulfy project of last year I learned of a program on Newgrounds that allows you to transform any flash file into a moviefile. It was a revelation.